The Three Month Vacation Podcast

When we think of motivated people, we rarely associate them with procrastination. Motivated people seem to get everything done, and yet if you speak to someone who is fairly productive, you will often find that they call themselves procrastinators. This feeling they express isn't just a way to seek attention. Instead, it's something that often drives them crazy. They almost come to a conclusion th...

A losing streak can show up at any time, and trying harder doesn't help. If you can't try harder or do more, what else can you do? Here's a system—a really simple system—that can turn your losing streak around. Here's how you go about it. 

Everybody starts out very excited when a business is in its infancy, but after a while, doesn't it get boring? How can you sustain a business for so long? 5000bc is our community site, and it has stayed steady for over two decades. Why is this the case? If you have an information-based community, how can you create something similar? This episode is a lot about me telling my story, but hopefully i...

What happens when we finally get from Greece to Frankfurt ? What's the meeting with Keanu about? Do we have any proof? Here's Part 2 of the trip to Greece. 

Generally, a holiday is full of different and new experiences, but sometimes it can take a sudden, unusual turn. You hope that you don't have that crazy experience while on a flight 30,000 feet above the air, but that's just what happened. That was the start of our journey to Greece. 

Dogs are lovely and I love dogs so much, but stray dogs are quite something else. Here's part 2 of the trip to Thailand. Dogs, gifts, mango milkshakes and fishermen who took a break. Enjoy. 

Almost 20 years after we launched The Brain Train, we weren't expecting anything dramatic to happen, and yet suddenly it was on a bestseller list. Not the New York Times bestseller list, but in Thailand. Here's the story, not of the book alone, but of our travel through Thailand as part of the three-month vacation. 

When you speak to somebody, do they get impatient? When you do an illustration, does it feel like the other person is waiting for ages? This is because you and I are operating at below normal speed. When we operate at below normal speed, we are reaching for information, and so we struggle quite a lot. What is normal speed, and how do you achieve that normal speed? That's what this episode is all a...

When you think of storytelling, you just think of a sequence or what happens next, but the reality is that storytelling is a curated amount of information. Anything that is not required simply becomes clutter, and clutter destroys a story. How do you recognise this clutter? Well, there are three ways. 

Some people are adamant that they will never use AI. However, that's a tiny, obscure minority. AI is here to stay and that means we've all dipped our toes in it. Well, I took a bath one day. I got AI to tidy up my article. What happened next? Let's find out. 

Many of us burn out simply because we live in the past. How long the past? We could go all the way to our childhood, and it's there where we learn how to go for perfection. It's this level of perfection that continues to drive us crazy for the rest of our lives. Is there a way out? Yes, there is. It's called quantity. Instead of trying to go for quality, you get to that stage of quality by working...

We hear that somehow we have to get 1% better every day. However, how do you measure this improvement? Can it be measured at all? And what does it mean? 

Once a course ends, it's often just the beginning of a journey. Think about it for a moment: you've finished an article writing course, and you've just managed to put all the pieces together. Now you need to keep going. That's the point when the teacher leaves the room, and so does the group that held everything together. We've tried, tried and tried again to make this follow up work but it's been...

We are constantly inundated with something new and improved. It seems almost impossible to keep up and we scramble for new tools. But what if we could pare back a lot and stay with a lot less? How can we achieve a much bigger "wow factor" with a lot less?

It's not important to win an argument in person. However, when writing a book or creating a presentation, you need to get a slightly new idea across. However, what if the client has a strong counter-opinion? In this episode we look at how to use misdirection to get across an idea that's new and make it feel like it was the client's idea all along.

Notice something strange when you tell a story. People are always waiting for you to finish because they want to know the point of the story. This subtle curiosity level gives us an advantage. It means that we can play director and change the path of the story. Every story seems to have a predefined pathway; yet what if we took one story and swung it in different ways? Wouldn't that be amazing? Le...

One-on-one consulting seems logical, even superior to group consulting. It's why clients consistently prefer it. Which is why it seems almost reckless to move to group consulting. All the obvious fears bubble up madly. How can we tackle these fears and keep the client more than happy? Let's find out in this second episode.

No one needs to tell us that one-on-one consulting is extremely tiresome, even when it's rewarding. Each consulting session takes so much time: the preparation before, the downtime needed after, and the session itself. But will clients appreciate it—or even stay with you—if you suddenly change to group consulting? Let's find out how it's done, because yes, we've done it before, and so have many ot...